My math is pretty bad in general. I wasn't sure if the Darkness talent actually reflects in her stats or not.

I believe haste has a reduced value after you hit 12.5%. Sure, it does reduce your global cooldown, but depending on how you're specc'd with the Rapid Renewal talent, the GCD value of haste is diminished.

I guess it really depends on your play style. Personally, when I stacked haste, my HPS was much lower. I prefer big long burst heals with EoL ticks rather than a slightly quicker PoH. We don't seem to get enough haste on gear yet to make a big dent in our PoH cast time. So I stack mastery instead. EoL does over 15-20% of my healing with PoH at the top followed by Renew when I raid heal. I'm usually at the top of the charts.

My math is pretty bad in general. I wasn't sure if the Darkness talent actually reflects in her stats or not.

I believe haste has a reduced value after you hit 12.5%. Sure, it does reduce your global cooldown, but depending on how you're specc'd with the Rapid Renewal talent, the GCD value of haste is diminished.

I guess it really depends on your play style. Personally, when I stacked haste, my HPS was much lower. I prefer big long burst heals with EoL ticks rather than a slightly quicker PoH. We don't seem to get enough haste on gear yet to make a big dent in our PoH cast time. So I stack mastery instead. EoL does over 15-20% of my healing with PoH at the top followed by Renew when I raid heal. I'm usually at the top of the charts.

To each his own.

A lot of this can also stem from the class mixup of other healers you have and their individual playing styles - and even down to raid strats for bosses. This is why the statement of "personal preference" goes a long way

My mana management, healing effectiveness and comfort level in healing raids and even in 5mans has gone up drastically after employing a lot of the heal style and spec suggestions from this thread. Thanks again everyone for your amazing help!

Also, If you're using Sanctuary alot, that's also a problem, it's pretty bad.

Can't stress this enough, the only time I use this spell is during times of massive predictable damage where I know people will be stacked in it (which basically amounts to Chimaeron feud since the majority of the other situations like P2 Al'akir and P2 Cho'gall are easier healed with PoH and PoM since the damage is so repetitive). Also you should already or soon be able to spam heal while actually still gaining mana so if you are just looking for your meter numbers to go up try heal spamming a tank during low raid damage times. This would be more effective than doing nothing during this time while PoM is on CD but may require a bit more gear and effective mana management during the rest of the fight to be effective.

I agree with Lunarsoul...nabbing a Mandala of Stirring Patterns might help you out. I remember having a lot of difficulty healing in my dungeon set until I picked up that bad boy, and it made a pretty significant difference. I think I was running with something mediocre in my other trinket slot, like Lifebound Alchemist Stone.

Also, if mana is problematic, make use of potions and your Shadowfiend. A timely Potion of Concentration is a huge help if there's even a slight gap in the fight, and Shadowfiends help save you some mana even while you continue casting.

I also have to agree with your RL on the meters. Don't stress them. Your job as a healer is to keep everyone alive, and if you're doing that, then you're doing your job. I only use meters to analyze my own spell selection; unless you're working with another priest who's specced and geared exactly the way you are and is casting spells in the same manner, it's comparing apples to oranges.

When you are holy don't look for crit, go mastery instead. Pre-cast PoH before damage actually gets so you pump more HPS. Be ready to change chakra to Serenity and Heal-Greater Heal turret. Use CoH just after you casting of PoH ends (that gives you speed advantage to other healers). And take in consideration Holy priest were having fun bc of the PoH, not it is nerfed.

gearing philosophy is 12.5% haste raidbuffed for the renew tick then stack mastery, at least for this tier

have you been using lightwell constantly? in the fights you described being behind the other healers on, it's ridiculously op. raid-cooperative vs non-useage of that one spell could easily account for the entire difference you're worried about.

generally try to use shadowfiend and hymn of hope together--they stack; hot the raid or do what you gotta do to get the time to cast all of it uninterrupted. that combo's your once a fight mana reset, divine hymn is your once a fight raidhealth reset: use them opportunistically with fight mechanics.

good raids will have enough separation of duty for you to stay in your better throughput spells while raidhealing, having the faith that another healer spot-heal the out-of-pattern-with-everyone-else's-health people... in fact, that's my favorite role to take on as disc: making the raidhealers look good by sniipe-healing the odd ducks and evening the field so they can stay in their 5th gears.

I've been taking notes and trying to absorb as much information in this thread as I can, since my own Priest is next on the 85 list. I didn't get around to levelling him for a few reasons, one of them pre 4.6.0 disc being mascots and have tried my hand at healing normals, so far so good, I'd just like to express thanks for all the info I might use, and probably forget, I got here (:

I've heard it helps if you get your party or raid members not to stand on top of the lightwell during encounters too, and obviously as you get more experience and practise in, you'll be able to put the wells in more optimal places. You can even spice things up a bit and buy some engineering flares to mark out where the Lightwell will be during those fights where stuff will be blowing up everywhere and fairly messy.

Otherwise the only advice I can give is that everyone who died was a wuss and needs to think about what they done wrong, even if they didn't do anything wrong. Because they had a priest healing them, duh!

Fly fast, stay low, hit hard.

You'd think the 8th Anniversary was the Cheese Anniversary to go with all the whine.

When you are holy don't look for crit, go mastery instead. Pre-cast PoH before damage actually gets so you pump more HPS. Be ready to change chakra to Serenity and Heal-Greater Heal turret. Use CoH just after you casting of PoH ends (that gives you speed advantage to other healers). And take in consideration Holy priest were having fun bc of the PoH, not it is nerfed.

Quick question: My raid healing comp is a holy paladin, resto druid and me (disc/holy). Since Holy don't typically get crit, I'm worried about maintaining Inspiration buff since Holy paladins and Resto druids don't have a similar buff. Should I just not bother with keeping Inspiration on, and just let RNG decide when people get it?
Normally, I use my my happy disc priest with lots of crit but for fights like Chimearon, Atramedes, Valiona&Theralion I go holy.

Quick question: My raid healing comp is a holy paladin, resto druid and me (disc/holy). Since Holy don't typically get crit, I'm worried about maintaining Inspiration buff since Holy paladins and Resto druids don't have a similar buff. Should I just not bother with keeping Inspiration on, and just let RNG decide when people get it?
Normally, I use my my happy disc priest with lots of crit but for fights like Chimearon, Atramedes, Valiona&Theralion I go holy.

Just don't worry about it. As Holy you're the raid healer - the other 2 classes can handle tank healing just fine.

I've heard it helps if you get your party or raid members not to stand on top of the lightwell during encounters too, and obviously as you get more experience and practise in, you'll be able to put the wells in more optimal places. You can even spice things up a bit and buy some engineering flares to mark out where the Lightwell will be during those fights where stuff will be blowing up everywhere and fairly messy.

It also helps to convince the tank that just because you put the lightwell up before the fight does not mean he should stack the ginormous boss right on top of it ><

I have my priest to the 12.5% haste renew cap, after that i find it greatly devalued as I can't really see the use of getting off any of my heals by like 0.2-0.3s faster. The damage coming out simply isn't high enough on any encounter to require repeatedly spam healing every single GCD. I had haste to around 16% in a raid environment and then switched it to mastery. I find as Holy Echo's of Light is generally 3-4 on my healing done. Whether it's overhealing depends on the fight, but I'd rather take a free overheal than risk having people not healed up to my satisfaction and be required to waste mana again with another heal. Mastery means less mana required overall.

Lightwell is mandatory, train your raid to use it. With 1-2 Lightwells, WoL parses have come back to show it healing for 500K+ on some of our fights. Not bad for a 7K spell.

If you're raid healing, I find it better to just stay in Sanctuary. If you're Tank Healing, Serenity. Pre-cast before any big damage is taken on the raid. You know the abilities that bosses will be tossing so when you knowing they're winding up for raid damage. Start casting before it hits, soon as PoH has landed, immediately follow with CoH. GCD should be up by the time PoH actually lands so it will save time. PoM I only use if I know at least 3 charges will be used. It's not worth it beneath that. Try not to overcut your PoH hot from the glyph. Heal one group, CoH, select another group to PoH. Come back to the first group when its dropped off if they still need healed.

If you get onto tank healing, keep renew up at all times, Mastery will be your best friend as when it's fully ramped up from a few Greater Heals, it will be like a second renew. Stay in Serenity, don't bother using GH unless the tank has taken more than 22-23K damage. PoM might be worth it if you expect something big to happen like raid damage that will cause it to bounce at least 3 times. Heal on tank and then you're helping out the raid a little as well. CoH on cooldown. You might not think it but it really adds up, for such a low mana cost. You'll be selecting the tank so he'll get a free heal/EoL plus you'll probably end up healing a couple of other people who weren't topped up.

This is generally how I play, I'm mana conservative in raids. I don't heal unless there's damage to heal and then it has to be greater than what I estimate my heals will do. IE, don't use GH on someone whos taken like 5K damage. On average my heal does 8-9K healing, my GH does 22-24. Know your averaging heals and apply what you think they need. I don't spam heal the tank just incase he gets hit as it lands etc. You might not be amazing on the meters but if you balance it, nobody will die and you'll have mana to spare incase something goes tits up.

As an anecdotal update: We raided BWD last night through Atramedes. I assigned my r-druid and h-pally to tank heals and let them know that "I GOT DIS SHIT" for raid heals. Things went AMAZINGLY. It was a magical night. We had a few tard-pulls on Magmaw, but our kill was super clean and decisive, and I was dominating the heals-done for most of the fight, and finished with nearly a quarter of my mana left, having only used M-Fiend 1 time (the h-pally pulled ahead of me at the last second with a single cast as the boss died.)

After having been significantly lower than my other healers in healing done and HPM for weeks, this was a monumental difference. No, I wasn't feeling like I was carrying the group, but I definitely felt like I was making a solid, meaningful contribution instead of being carried myself. I was even able to tease my h-pally that my shoulders hurt and to stop slacking off on some trash pulls and encounters, (which OOM'd him a couple of times to get 16k HPS just to rub it in my face lol... he's like my little brother.) So all in all: thanks again everyone for the helpful suggestions, you've made a HUGE difference in my raiding!

i'll throw a little finesse option for you to consider, though i wouldn't recommend it until you're already very comfortable with everything else. I've taken a lot of pleasure from a holy-archangel build, trading out mostly the low shadow talents. of course i can't reach deep enough for attonement, but the mana-return and +3% healing per stack is still very worthwhile.

many people don't realize how much time one potentially has to build up stacks. one smite every 20 seconds is what it takes to keep stacks from falling off. that means if you have the cast time of one smite available once every 20 seconds, you could have more mana and healing, not that it's that cut-and-dry of course. letting a 4-stack fall off unused is PUNISHING, because you've likely set yourself back a little to get it, and then never gotten anything for your effort. i've gone so far as to seek a mod to help me visualize this, and i arrived at combopointsredux, which i configured to show stacks of that much like a rogue'd see combopoints, though i wish it had an option to display time remaining as well, if anyone has a better suggestion i'd love to hear it.

getting that 5stack archangel for 15% healing before dropping a sanctuary, lightwell, or going through a poh burst is goodness ^_^ much easier to do once one knows the timings of fight events by heart, meanwhile don't be afraid to make do with a 3stack if that's all one has time for. one thing i often do in heroics is get a 5stack archangel renew ticking on the tank & maybe a melee dps that always takes dmg, then just keep that one rolling, never letting it drop off even between trash packs with chakra serenity: keeps my mana level higher than a georgia pine.

honestly i'm nowhere near geared or comfortable enough in raids to be pulling this off much outside of magmaw's rest period or such, but i use it in heroics all the time. perhaps those are somewhat wasted talentpoints when under-utilized, but that's what i like about it: it has a higher skill-bar for a little extra benefit.